Parts of the internet across the globe were disrupted Friday after three separate cyberattacks targeted against a New Hampshire company.

The Department of Homeland Security is among the agencies looking into the attacks on Manchester-based Dyn, an internet traffic management company. The attacks caused issues along the East Coast that affected popular websites such as Netflix and Twitter.

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"Dyn is like a traffic cop that helps guide our browsers to content providers like Twitter and Spotify who need a lot of bandwidth," said Gary Miliefsky, CEO of online security company SnoopWall.

The company sent out an alert Friday morning saying that someone had attacked its infrastructure on the East Coast. It wasn’t until Friday afternoon and two subsequent attacks that Dyn reported that the threat had been mitigated.

"It appears to me that Dyn is being hit with a distributed denial of service attack repeatedly, either by someone who is testing them, maybe to see what would happen before elections and this is a pre-test, or they are threatening them for ransom," Miliefsky said.

Miliefsky said a DDoS attack is a common method used by hackers, and it’s easy to carry out. He said the method of cyberattack uses compromised computers or internet-connected devices to form what’s known as a botnet to send large volumes of traffic to specific servers to shut them down.

"Anything on the internet that gets infected with botnet code can be used en mass to attack companies like Dyn or other content providers with so much massive traffic that they can’t handle the bandwidth, and then the average consumer cannot browse to Spotify or Twitter today," Miliefsky said.

Miliefsky said that there is no way to prevent such a cyberattack, and he said it will be hard to track down who is responsible.

"To trace an attack like this, you have to find the command-and-control server that is kicking off the botnets, and in the dark web, we have found many of these for rent," Miliefsky said. "So it’s hard to tell which one is doing it, when you can actually pay $300 for 10 minutes of a DDoS attack."